The next-to-final College Football Playoff rankings are here, with Ohio State and Stanford hoping for chaos

The Playoff committee's new top 25 shows one clear group of contenders, then a smaller group in need of madness. The whole thing's below.

There are four teams in line right now to play for the Playoff. But really, there are five, if you count the definite play-in game. No. 4 Iowa and No. 5 Michigan State will meet on Saturday in the Big Ten Championship, with the winner locking up a spot.

This means the group in need of mayhem starts at No. 6, where it's Ohio State and then Stanford.

There's not much opportunity for that mayhem, as a loss by No. 1 Clemson to No. 10 North Carolina could just mean the high-scoring, one-loss Tar Heels taking a place. Oklahoma's schedule is already done, since the Big 12 doesn't have to worry about a title game.

Florida has too far to climb even with an unlikely win over Alabama, so anyone looking for a sure opportunity is rooting for the Gators.

Stanford has ground to gain. A win over newly ranked USC would clinch the committee's nebulous conference title bonus. That means the Buckeyes have no way to accomplish anything other than by politicking, which Urban Meyer did masterfully as Florida's coach during the 2006 debate, when he helped create the SEC's strength-of-schedule image. That was the polls-and-computers era, though, and now we're talking about a committee. Does it work now?

So, with mere hours of college football left until the only rankings of the season that matter matter, here's the new top 25:

The Playoff Picture Is Clear, As Long As Alabama And Clemson Win Saturday

But if they lose, prepare for chaos.

Clemson’s Artavis Scott goes up for a reception in last week’s game against South Carolina.

Richard Shiro/ AP

The top five teams were unchanged in Tuesday evening’s College Football Playoff committee rankings. Clemson, Alabama, Oklahoma, Iowa and Michigan State remain entrenched in the No. 1 to No. 5 spots, and all control their own destiny. So no news there. But shifts in the rankings of Stanford, Ohio State and North Carolina sent important signals as to how the committee thinks.

First, though, the four major conference championship games must be played Saturday. And FiveThirtyEight is here to provide some probabilistic guidance, if not omniscient assurance, as to how the playoff picture will be affected come Saturday night. Here are our projections of which teams the committee will include in the playoff with its final rankings on Sunday:

Ranking

Probability of …

Team

CFP

Elo

FPI

Conf. Title

Playoff

Nat. Title

Oklahoma 11-1

3

3

1

100%

99%

42%

Alabama 11-1

2

1

2

74%

79%

25%

Clemson 12-0

1

5

7

57%

77%

14%

Michigan St. 11-1

5

4

14

62%

61%

7%

Iowa 12-0

4

12

26

38%

40%

3%

Ohio State 11-1

6

2

3

0%

16% ▼ 6a

4%

North Carolina 11-1

10

9

15

43%

14%

2%

Stanford 10-2

7

6

11

48%

13%

2%

Florida 10-2

18

22

23

26%

<1%

<1%

College Football Playoff (CFP) rankings as of Dec. 1. Playoff probability changes are since Nov. 29; only changes greater than 5 percentage points are shown.

The playoff picture is quite simple if Alabama and Clemson win the SEC and ACC titles, respectively. Both are locks for the playoff if that happens. So is the winner of the Big Ten championship game between Michigan State and Iowa; that game amounts to a quarterfinal. Oklahoma, which won the Big 12 championship and is done with its regular season, is a shoo-in, by our model’s estimation.

But should either Alabama or Clemson (or both) lose on Saturday, it’s anyone’s guess who gets in.

Ohio State, which moved up to No. 6 in the latest rankings, saw its playoff odds decline to 16 percent from 22 percent. (Our model has consistently liked the Buckeyes better than the committee has, in part because of their high Elo rating, so they’ve tended to fall slightly when new committee rankings are released.) Still, Ohio State remained ahead of Stanford in the committee standings.

In theory, that would make Ohio State next in line in the event of a Clemson or Alabama loss.1 The problem is that other schools have more of an opportunity to impress the committee this weekend. Although our model gives Stanford a 13 percent shot at the playoff — slightly lower than Ohio State’s — that’s because the Cardinal face a tough opponent in USC for the Pac-12 championship. Stanford is more likely than Ohio State to make it in if it wins that game, however; another quality win plus a newly minted conference title would probably be enough for it to leapfrog the Buckeyes, according to the model.

A trickier case is North Carolina, which is hanging around with a 14 percent shot. Even if the Tar Heels beat Clemson, they’re not assured of much; our model gives them only about a one-in-three shot at the playoff if they win the ACC title. UNC, ranked No. 8 in the AP poll, didn’t receive any favors from the committee, which slotted it in at No. 10 because of concerns over its weak schedule. The committee will have an opportunity to reconsider if the Tar Heels win, but the team may need to beat Clemson convincingly to up its odds.

Finally, don’t write off Clemson — which could have an opportunity to make it in even with a loss. In the event that it falls to UNC, Clemson would have a résumé similar to Ohio State’s as a one-loss non-champion — but with a stronger schedule, an additional win (Clemson would be 12-1 to Ohio State’s 11-1), and victories over Notre Dame and Florida State.

There was an urge to push the panic button after the failure to land a playoff invitation in Year One. The Big 12 did something smart instead. It did something logical. And now we can say with something approaching absolute certainty that the Oklahoma Sooners will be playoff bound when the official announcement is made on Sunday.

In the final Tuesday night rankings from the College Football Playoff committee in Grapevine, OU ranked 3rd and is set to play Alabama here in the Cotton Bowl on Dec. 31 if the rankings hold after this weekend's conference championship games. Of course, that won't necessarily happen.

While the Big 12 champs are secure, the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference could both play their way out of the playoffs Saturday, not in.

I don't expect Alabama to lose to Florida any more than I thought the Crimson Tide could have lost to Missouri in the Georgia Dome a year ago. But all that game represents for the SEC is potential disaster. Alabama can stumble out with a second loss. Florida, currently ranked 18th by the committee, isn't going to jump all the way in.

The same applies to the ACC where No. 1 Clemson could presumably fall out of the playoff picture but North Carolina, ranked 10th, won't move all the way up with an upset victory.

The Big Ten simply has two teams playing with the champion advancing while the Pac-12 is back to playing for a trip to the Rose Bowl...not the worst consolation prize in the world (especially for Stanford since it hasn't won a Rose Bowl since my older brother was a junior there -- i.e., it's been awhile) but not the playoff that has become the only real target for the five power conferences.

After going 8-1, winning games at Baylor and at Oklahoma State and holding on at home to beat TCU when Heisman candidate Baker Mayfield was injured, OU did it the hard way. But what if the Big 12 had, in fact, panicked and gone after that precious "13th data point" (otherwise known as a 13th game) that Commissioner Bob Bowlsby talked about last year in such ominous tones.

Oklahoma, having already beaten all three of the 7-2 teams, would be forced to go play one of them again (probably Baylor) on a neutral site. Now with the Bears' injuries at quarterback, OU would probably win, but what if the Sooners didn't? Then the championship game would have done nothing but add the risk of playoff elimination.

Having made the correct decision not to incorporate an unnecessary championship game, the Big 12 has already moved in the right direction for 2016. The decision to backload the powerful teams' schedules -- OU, OSU, Baylor and TCU all battling it out in November -- was designed to give the winning team or teams a boost in the rankings.

But it came with considerable risk. It may not be fair -- in fact it isn't -- but late-season losses remain most costly. The Ohio State Buckeyes are out of the top four because their loss to Michigan State came late.

Oklahoma and Alabama are riding high because their losses to lesser teams came early in the season.

I know some folks are still shaking their heads over the fact that a team that lost to Texas is playoff-bound while Ohio State's only loss is to a team ranked in the top five. I don't have a problem with that as long as the team with the bad loss has better wins. And Oklahoma surely does.

Give me a team that proves itself a number of times against good teams, some of them on the road, and has one inexplicable stumble on its resume. I will take that over a team that loses to the best team it faces and piles up wins against lesser enemies.

And please don't tell me about the six or seven bowl teams Ohio State has defeated. With the NCAA creating new rules to allow 5-7 teams to go to bowls, all you have to do is win two or three conference games and schedule lightly in the non-conference and you're bowl-bound.

That's an embarrassment to address another day, not an argument on behalf of the defending champs.

Oklahoma has four wins over teams ranked in the committee's top 25. And that's good enough.

December 3, 20154:57 pm

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HOW WOULD IOWA FARE IN THE OLD NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP SYSTEMS?

Let's drop the 2015 Hawkeyes in the 1985 bowl system and see what develops

Iowa is one game away from having at least one more game. Should the Hawkeyes beat Michigan State in the Big Ten Championship Game Saturday, they are virtually assured a spot in the College Football Playoff (read that sentence again...we'll wait).

But does Iowa benefit from the playoff system? How would an undefeated Iowa fare in the old incarnations of the championship-deciding poll systems? Would we be better off in the Rose Bowl? Let's have a look.

The good news is that Iowa fans would get to go to the Rose Bowl, which at least a third of Iowa fans would rather do than go to the Playoff anyway. The bad news is that, at least as the polls currently sit, Iowa would have no chance of winning a national championship barring an upset in the Sugar Bowl and something weird in the Orange Bowl. If Clemson wins, Clemson is your champion. If Clemson loses and Alabama wins, either Alabama or Oklahoma would be national champion, and they likely would split the title as happened in 1990 and 1991, which was pretty much the reason we got rid of this system anyway.

There is one other variable to consider: The current rankings themselves. The AP and Coaches polls have, almost comically, adjusted their modus operandi since the Playoff Committee Top 25 was introduced to the system. Formerly, the polls would stick with their system of "losing team goes down, everyone else shuffles up" all the way through the season. Only monumental wins could shake the prevailing wisdom. The polls now keep up that stubborn adherence to preseason rankings only until that first Playoff Committee poll hits the press, at which point the pollsters completely recalibrate their votes to conform to the only poll that matters.

Take, for instance, this season. Ohio State was the near-unanimous top team in the country entering the season. Despite some performances lacking a certain luster over the season's first nine weeks, the Buckeyes remained the top team in both major polls. On the Sunday before the first College Football Playoff poll was released, Ohio State still held 39 of 61 first-place votes in the AP Poll and 48 of 64 in the Coaches Poll. Clemson had 6 first-place votes from the AP and 2 from the Coaches. The next week, Clemson beat No. 17 Florida State, a big win but hardly an earth-shattering result. Ohio State knocked off Minnesota on the same day without too much trouble. Yet Clemson suddenly had 31 first-place votes in the AP Poll, taking the top spot from Ohio State, and 21 votes from the Coaches Poll.

The big change in the calculation of voters was not the Florida State win. Rather, the change came from the introduction of the College Football Playoff poll that week, which the AP and Coaches then impersonated like they'd suddenly become Frank Caliendo. It wasn't just at the top of the poll, either. Just seven teams changed positions in the final pre-Playoff AP Poll, and six teams changed rankings in the Coaches Poll. The next week, as writers and SIDs scrambled to match the Playoff Committee, just one team stayed in the same position in the AP and the Coaches Poll (though not the same team, oddly enough, because writers suddenly discovered that Clemson was good before the SIDs did).

The AP and Coaches polls of 2015 are the old French radical asking a mob of people where they are going so that he can lead them there. The Playoff poll makes them quaint and irrelevant now, but it also means that the current polls aren't quite what we could expect had the Committee never came into existence. We can only go with what they have done this year, but the polls could look completely different if we really did roll back to a previous version of this particular software.

You can see pretty quickly why loyalty to the Rose Bowl was kind of killing the Big Ten. If you finished first in the Big Ten during the Bowl Coalition, you got to go the Rose Bowl, which is awesome. If you finished second, you got to go to the Citrus Bowl, which is pretty cool. If you finished third, even if that meant you were No. 6 in the country like Ohio State is this season, you got to play in the Holiday Bowl which...is in San Diego? Three Big Ten teams went 10-1 in 1993, and one of them ended up playing unranked BYU on December 30.

That wouldn't matter much to Iowa, which would play in the Rose Bowl against Stanford again, and would be left out of the national championship picture again. And if you think there would be a split, ask Penn State how that went for them in 1992. Or West Virginia, which was undefeated and ranked No. 2 by the coaches behind also-undefeated Nebraska but dropped to third behind the Huskers and one-loss Florida State by the AP. Nebraska played Florida State, the Noles won, and Florida State ended up as national champion.

Bowl Alliance (1995-97)

At least the Big Ten gets its due under the Bowl Alliance (though Michigan State could have been shoved out by Notre Dame by virtue of being Michigan State and not Notre Dame) and the games get better, but the scenario stays the same. A national championship game between Clemson and Alabama, and Iowa on the outside looking in.

For purposes of determining the BCS formula's selections, we're using the Massey composite rankings as a generic computer poll. And in that world, Alabama might be the top team in the country; Clemson is a fairly distant third behind the Crimson Tide AND Oklahoma.

The one team definitely not getting a boost is Iowa, which would get a Rose Bowl bid as Big Ten champion but likely fall behind Ohio State and Michigan State in the final rankings based on their No. 8 finish in the computer polls. North Carolina falls victim to the same curse, getting passed by Florida State (who presents a better option to the Orange Bowl regardless). Michigan State and UNC are left behind to avoid having three teams from the same conference in the BCS bowls, and Houston gets an at-large spot.

The takeaway from this? If you like the Rose Bowl and/or being really mad at everyone for the first nine months of next year, the old systems were great for you. In every circumstance, a No. 4-ranked Iowa team would be left out of the running for a chance at a national title. Penn State fans still talk about being denied their opportunity to win a title in 1994. Iowa fans could turn that into 50 years of rage. But if you want an actual chance, we're living in the golden age. Embrace it, because there's no guarantee we'll ever be here again.

Who Will Win Playoff? We Already Know Who Lost

The self-proclaimed "Conference of Champions" can take on another moniker, at least for the 2015 football season:

The Biggest Loser.

We don't know who's going to win the College Football Playoff, but we already know for sure who won't.

The Pac-12 is the only Power 5 conference left out of the four-team playoff, with its champion Stanford consigned to the Rose Bowl. It's also the only Power 5 conference with just one team in the New Year's Six bowl games, while the Big Ten (three) and SEC, Big 12 and ACC (two each) landed multiple teams.

Selection committee chairman Jeff Long said that Stanford, ranked No. 6, really "wasn't close" to making it into the top four. What sunk the Cardinal was their two losses as all four playoff participants have no more than one loss each.

And just think, had Stanford scheduled, say, FCS team Sac State or even San Jose State, for its opener instead of a road game at Northwestern, it easily could've made the playoff, or at least made the committee's job very difficult in terms of which conference champion to leave out of the playoff.

Stanford faced 12 Power 5 opponents in its 13 games (counting Notre Dame), more than any team in the country. Even with that loss to the Wildcats, who went on to finish 10-2, the Cardinal still managed to beat 10 Power 5 teams, more than three of the playoff participants (Alabama, Oklahoma and Michigan State), which only defeated nine each.

While the committee claims to take strength of schedule into strong consideration, there's no evidence that it has penalized teams for their scheduling practices in its two years of existence. The SEC, ACC and Big Ten all made the playoff both years while playing only eight conference games, with every SEC team and most ACC teams playing at least one FCS opponent each.

The Pac-12, meanwhile, is the only Power 5 conference that plays nine conference games and stages a title game. Most Pac-12 teams also schedule at least one Power 5 opponent in its three non-conference games. Two teams (USC and UCLA) have never played an FCS team in their history.

During the past two seasons (2014 and 2015), the Pac-12 has the best winning percentage against Power 5 non-conference opponents by a wide margin (19-11, .633). The SEC is second (18-17, .514) while the other three conferences have losing records.

But none of that seems to impress the committee. While Long claims that his fellow members consider analytics and watch game film, invariably they fall for the same "eye test" metric just like your average voters in the AP and coaches polls.

Since that's the case, the SEC and ACC have shown no inclination of altering their scheduling practices, which means eight conference games and a lot of cupcakes for the rest. So for the Pac-12, it's not a level playing field. Not just for this year, but for years to come.

This is the same Oklahoma team. The same Sooners that this time last year were on the verge of disaster.

That couldn’t win a big game anymore under coach Bob Stoops. That no longer ruled the Big 12. That was set up for a spectacular fall after an embarrassing 34-point loss in a bowl game to a team playing a backup quarterback.

Then Baker Mayfield got eligible, Stoops hired a new offensive coordinator (Lincoln Riley) and OU is now the hottest team in the game heading into the College Football Playoff.

The reason is simple: the play of Mayfield, the Sporting News 2015 Player of the Year.

“I don’t think you can overstate how important Baker has been to this team,” Stoops said.

Maybe even the difference between playing for it all and playing out the string – both the season and a spectacular coaching career in Norman for Stoops. Fair or not, Stoops was feeling heat heading into this season, and had made changes to the staff in the offseason to address some glaring problems.

At the top of the list was the quarterback spot, where OU had struggled the previous two seasons and where the Sooners hadn’t had a game-changer in the most important position on the field since Sam Bradford won the Heisman Trophy in 2008. Mayfield transferred from Texas Tech last season, and despite OU’s significant efforts with the NCAA, he wasn’t granted an appeal to play immediately.

On the outside looking in, OU’s desperation to get Mayfield eligible seemed strange, especially considering the Sooners were coming off a big win over Alabama in the Sugar Bowl – a game where quarterback Trevor Knight played well and gave a hint of big things to come in 2014.

Now we know why OU was so intent on getting Mayfield eligible in 2014: he’s a game-changer. He’s a program-defining player whose spirit, intensity and moxie rub off on others around him, forcing them to perform at his level.

“I never had an idea of changing the way we do things around here,” Mayfield said. “I just wanted to fit in and do whatever I could to help.”

All he did was make OU a national power again, and lead the Sooners to the College Football Playoff – something that seemed like a pipedream this time last season. Mayfield threw for 35 touchdowns, and rushed for seven more, had 3,383 yards passing and completed nearly 70 percent of his throws.

Last season, with essentially the same two-deep depth chart, Oklahoma’s quarterbacks threw for 17 TDS and 17 INTs and the Sooners lost five games. But the impact of Mayfield goes far beyond numbers.

His magnetic personality and carefree style helped loosen up a team that at times played much too tight over the last two seasons. OU played tight, made mistakes, lost games and lost its mojo.

Mayfield brought it all back, from the way he immediately connected with teammates when he first arrived last season, to how he handled his responsibility after winning the starting job in fall camp – to how he played week after week.

“Football should be fun,” Mayfield said. “We’re playing a game. We can be serious and we can be focused on what we have to do every single play. But the bottom line is we’re having fun playing a game.”

NCFAA

The Biletnikoff Award is a member of the National College Football Awards Association (NCFAA). The NCFAA was founded in 1997 as a coalition of the major collegiate football awards to protect, preserve and enhance the integrity, influence and prestige of the game’s predominant awards. The NCFAA encourages professionalism and the highest standards for the administration of its member awards and the selection of their candidates and recipients. For more information, visit the association’s official website, www.ncfaa.org.